The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

PURITANS AND PRIGS

PURITANISM was a highly elaborated moral, religious, intellectual, and political tradition which had its origins in the writing and social experimentation of John Calvin and those he influenced. While it flourished on this continent — it appears to me to have died early in this century — it established great universities and cultural institutions and an enlightened political order. It encouraged simplicity in dress and manner and an aesthetic interest in the functional which became bone and marrow of what we consider modern. Certainly the idea that a distaste for the mannered and elaborated should be taken to indicate joylessness or an indifference to beauty is an artifact of an old polemic. No acquaintance with New England portrait or decorative art encourages the idea that Puritan tastes were somber. Even their famous headstones display a marked equanimity beside headstones in Church of England graveyards in Britain, with their naturalistic skulls with bones in their teeth and so on. Puritan civilization in North America quickly achieved unprecedented levels of literacy, longevity, and mass prosperity, or happiness, as it was called in those days. To isolate its special character we need only compare colonial New England and Pennsylvania — Quakers as well as Congregationalists and Presbyterians were Puritans — with the colonial South.

Or let us compare them with ourselves. When crops failed in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1743, Jonathan Edwards of course told his congregation that they had their own wickedness to blame for it. They had failed to do justice (his word) to the poor. He said, “Christian people are to give to others not only so as to lift him above extremity but liberally to furnish him.” No one bothers us now with the notion that our own failures in this line might be called sinful, though we fall far short of the standard that in Edwards’s view invited divine wrath. Nor does anyone suggest that punishment might follow such failures, though the case could easily be made that our whole community is punished for them every day. In one respect at least we have rid ourselves entirely of Puritanism.

My reading of Puritan texts is neither inconsiderable nor exhaustive, so while I cannot say they yield no evidence of Puritanism as we understand the word, I can say they are by no means characterized by, for example, fear or hatred of the body, anxiety about sex, or denigration of women. This cannot be said of Christian tradition in general, yet for some reason Puritanism is uniquely regarded as synonymous with these preoccupations. Puritans are thought to have taken a lurid pleasure in the notion of hell, and certainly hell seems to have been much in their thoughts, though not more than it was in the thoughts of Dante, for example. We speak as though John Calvin invented the Fall of Man, when that was an article of faith universal in Christian culture.

For Europeans, our Puritans showed remarkably little tendency to hunt witches, yet one lapse, repented of by those who had a part in it, has stigmatized them as uniquely inclined to this practice. They are condemned for their dealings with the Indians, quite justly, and yet it is important to point out that contact between native people anywhere and Europeans of whatever sort was disastrous, through the whole colonial period and after. It is pointless to speak as if Puritanism were the factor that caused the disasters in New England, when Anglicans and Catholics elsewhere made no better account of themselves. Cortés was no Puritan, but William Penn was one. By the standards of the period in which they flourished, American Puritans were not harsh or intolerant in the ordering of their own societies. Look a little way into contemporary British law — Jonathan Swift would never have seen a woman flayed in New England, yet it is Old England we think of as having avoided repressive extremes. If a Puritan writer had made Swift’s little joke — that it altered her appearance for the worse — I wonder how it would sound to us. As for religious intolerance, one must again consider the standards of the period. The Inquisition was not officially ended until 1837. Quakers living in Britain were deprived of their civil rights well into the nineteenth century, as were Catholics and Jews. It seems fair to note that such tolerance as there was in Europe was to be found in Calvinist enclaves such as Holland.

What does it matter if a tradition no one identifies with any longer is unjustly disparaged? If history does not precisely authorize the use we make of the word “Puritanism,” we all know what we mean by it, so what harm is done? Well, for one thing we make ourselves ignorant and contemptuous of the first two or three hundred years of one major strain of our own civilization. I am eager to concede that in our cataclysmic world this is a little misfortune, arousing even in me only the kind of indignation that could be thoroughly vented in a long footnote somewhere. In fact it is by no means proved to my satisfaction that a society is happier or safer or more humane for having an intense interest in its own past.

Yet the way we speak and think of the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism. Very simply, it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved. And it demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry. I know from experience that if one says the Puritans were a more impressive and ingratiating culture than they are assumed to have been, one will be heard to say that one finds repressiveness and intolerance ingratiating. Unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension, not intentionally and not to anyone’s benefit, but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus. This instinct is so powerful that I would suspect it had survival value, if history or current events gave me the least encouragement to believe we are equipped to survive.

To spare myself the discomfort of reinforcing the same negative associations I have just deplored, and for weightier reasons, I will introduce another name in the place of “Puritanism” to indicate the phenomenon we are here to discuss. I choose the word “priggishness.” This fine old English word, of no known etymology and therefore fetched from the deep anonymous heart of English generations, is a virtual poem in the precision with which it expresses pent irritation. One imagines the word being spat, never shouted, which suggests it is a trait most commonly found among people who are at some kind of advantage. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines “priggish” as “marked by overvaluing oneself or one’s ideas, habits, notions, by precise or inhibited adherence to them, and by small disparagement of others.” In adopting this word I hope to make the point that the very important phenomenon it describes transcends culture and history. I believe we have all heard accounts of unbridled priggishness during the Cultural Revolution in China, for example, or in Spain under the dictatorship of Franco.

Americans never think of themselves as sharing fully in the human condition, and therefore beset as all humankind is beset. Rather they imagine that their defects result from their being uniquely the products of a crude system of social engineering. They believe this is a quirk of their brief and peculiar history, a contraption knocked together out of ramshackle utilitarianism and fueled by devotion to the main chance. This engineering is performed by them and upon them negligently or brutally, or with shrewd cynicism or mindless acquiescence, all tending to the same result: shallowness, materialism, a merely ersatz humanity.

Clearly there is an element of truth in this. The error comes in the belief that they are in any degree exceptional, that there is a more human world in which they may earn a place if only they can rid themselves of the deficiencies induced by life in an invented nation and a manufactured culture. They have one story they tell themselves over and over, which is: once we were crude and benighted, and in fact the vast majority of us remain so, but I and perhaps certain of my friends have escaped this brute condition by turning our backs on our origins with contempt, with contempt and derision. When anything goes wrong, the thinkers among us turn once again to the old conversion narrative: This is a resurgence of former brutishness, which we will spurn and scorn till we have exorcised it, or at least until those whose approval we covet know this old spirit no longer has power over us, personally — though we cannot, of course, speak for all our friends. In great things as in small, we are forever in a process of recovery from a past that is always being reinterpreted to account for present pathologies. When things went wrong in Calvinist America, the minister or mayor or governor or president, including of course Lincoln, would declare a Day of Fasting and Humiliation, during which businesses and offices closed and the population went to their various churches to figure out what they were doing wrong and how to repent of it.

The assumption of present responsibility for the present state of things was a ritual feature of life in this culture for two and a half centuries, and is entirely forgotten by us now. Though I cannot take time to make the argument for it here, it is my belief that a civilization can trivialize itself to death, that we have set our foot in that path, and that our relation to the issue of responsibility is one measure of our progress. No matter, it is a self-limiting misfortune — by the time the end comes, the loss to the world will be very small. My point here is simply that there is a reflex in this culture of generalized disapproval, of small or great disparagement, of eagerness to be perceived as better than one’s kind, which is itself priggish, and which creates the atmosphere in which these exotic new varieties of priggishness can flower.

The Calvinist doctrine of total depravity — “depravity” means “warping or distortion” — was directed against casuistical enumerations of sins, against the attempt to assign them different degrees of seriousness. For Calvinism, we are all absolutely, that is equally, unworthy of, and dependent upon, the free intervention of grace. This is a harsh doctrine, but no harsher than others, since Christian tradition has always assumed that rather few would be saved, and has differed only in describing the form election would take. It might be said in defense of Christianity that it is unusual in a religion to agonize much over these issues of ultimate justice, though in one form or another every religion seems to have an elect. The Calvinist model at least allows for the mysteriousness of life. For in fact life makes goodness much easier for some people than for others, and it is rich with varieties of cautious or bland or malign goodness, in the Bible referred to generally as self-righteousness, and inveighed against as grievous offenses in their own right. The belief that we are all sinners gives us excellent grounds for forgiveness and self-forgiveness, and is kindlier than any expectation that we might be saints, even while it affirms the standards all of us fail to attain.

A Puritan confronted by failure and ambivalence could find his faith justified by the experience, could feel that the world had answered his expectations. We have replaced this and other religious visions with an unsystematic, uncritical and in fact unconscious perfectionism, which may have taken root among us while Stalinism still seemed full of promise, and to have been refreshed by the palmy days of National Socialism in Germany, by Castro and by Mao — the idea that society can and should produce good people, that is, people suited to life in whatever imagined optimum society, who then stabilize the society in its goodness so that it produces more good people, and so on. First the bad ideas must be weeded out and socially useful ones put in their place. Then the bad people must be identified, especially those that are carriers of bad ideas. Societies have done exactly the same thing from motives they considered religious, of course. But people of advanced views believe they are beyond that kind of error, because they have not paused to worry about the provenance or history of these advanced views. Gross error survives every attempt at perfection, and flourishes. No Calvinist could be surprised. No reader of history could be surprised.

Disallowing factors of disruption and recalcitrance called by names like “sin,” what conclusion can be drawn? If human beings are wholly the products of societies, and societies are accessible to reform, what other recourse is there than to attempt to reform one and the other? The question seems pressing now that the community increasingly fails its individual members, and as it is more and more feared, abused, or abandoned by them.

I depend here on the general sense that we are suffering a radical moral decline which is destroying the fabric of society, seriously threatening our sense of safety as well as of mutual respect and shared interest. Such anxieties can be dangerous and irrational — perhaps they are in most cases. But the evidence is impressive that we are now looking at real decay, so I will accept the notion for the purposes of this discussion. I take on faith Tocqueville’s lapidary remark that we were great because we were good, when he knew us. Let us say, as history would encourage us to do, that one great difference between then and now is the sense of sin which then flourished, the belief that mortals are born in a state of sin, that no one is or is likely to be perfected. One implication of that belief is certainly that neither social engineering nor intellectual eugenics could produce a good society full of good people. Americans studied the example of biblical Israel, for whom God himself had legislated, and who sinned and strayed very much in the manner of people less favored. The teaching that surrounded the biblical history of Israel suggested that to do justice and love mercy made the community good, but never that the community could be so ordered as to create a population conditioned always to do justice and love mercy. The community never ceased to struggle against contrary impulses, which it did not induce in itself and from which it could not free itself. Christian individualism enforced the awareness that exactly the same impulses are always at work in one’s own soul.

The Stalinist vision is much more optimistic. It can propose a solution. Society is simply other people, useful or not, capable of contributing to the general good, or not. Creatures of society, they are also the reasons for the continuing failure and suffering of society. At the same time, since society is the only possible agent of its own transformation, the victim stands revealed as the enemy, the obstacle to reform, the problem to be eliminated. Freed of those it has maimed, it might at last be perfect. This is a great solipsism, a tautology, based on a model of human being-in-the-world which, curiously, has long seemed scientific to people because it is so extremely narrow and simple and has no basis in history or experience.

This social vision has also an attraction that Puritanism never had, Puritanism with its grand assertion and concession, In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all. It creates clear distinctions among people, and not only justifies the disparagement of others but positively requires it. Its adherents are overwhelmingly those who feel secure in their own reasonableness, worth, and goodness, and are filled with a generous zeal to establish their virtues through the whole of society, and with an inspiring hope that this transformation can be accomplished. It would seem to me unfair and extreme to liken our new zealots to Stalinists, if I did not do so with the understanding that the whole of the culture is very much influenced by these assumptions, and that in this as in other ways the zealots differ from the rest of us only as an epitome differs from a norm.

Optimists of any kind are rare among us now. Rather than entertaining visions, we think in terms of stopgaps and improvisations. A great many of us, in the face of recent experience, have arrived with a jolt at the archaic-sounding conclusion that morality was the glue holding society together, just when we were in the middle of proving that it was a repressive system to be blamed for all our ills. It is not easy at this point for us to decide just what morality is or how to apply it to our circumstances. But we have priggishness at hand, up-to-date and eager to go to work, and it does a fine imitation of morality, as self-persuaded as a Method actor. It looks like morality and feels like it, both to those who wield it and to those who taste its lash.

(Since I am already dependent on one, I will attempt a definition of authentic morality, based on common usage. When we say someone is moral, we mean that she is loyal in her life and behavior to an understanding of what is right and good, and will honor it even at considerable cost to herself. We would never say she was not moral because she did not urge or enforce her own standards on other people. Nor would we say she was more moral for attempting to impose her standards than she would be if she made no such attempt. Similarly, we say someone is immoral because she does not govern her behavior to answer to any standard of right or good. That being true of her, we would never say she was not immoral because she tried to enforce a standard of virtue on the people around her, nor even that she was less immoral for making such an attempt. Nor would we say someone was moral because her society had in one way or another so restricted her behavior that she could not, in its terms, do anything wrong.)

Though etymologically “morality” means something like social custom, as we use it it means the desire to govern oneself, expressed as behavior. People who attempt this fail, and learn in the course of failing that to act well, even to know what it is to act well, is a great struggle and a mystery. Rather than trying to reform others, moral people seem to me especially eager to offer pardon in the hope of receiving pardon, to forego judgment in the hope of escaping judgment.

So perhaps what I have called priggishness is useful in the absence of true morality, which requires years of development, perhaps thousands of years, and cannot simply be summoned as needed. Its inwardness and quietism make its presence difficult to sense, let alone quantify, and they make its expression often idiosyncratic and hard to control. But priggishness makes its presence felt. And it is highly predictable because it is nothing else than a consuming loyalty to ideals and beliefs which are in general so widely shared that the spectacle of zealous adherence to them is reassuring. The prig’s formidable leverage comes from the fact that his or her ideas, notions, or habits are always fine variations on the commonplace. A prig with original ideas is a contradiction in terms, because he or she is a creature of consensus who can usually appeal to one’s better nature, if only in order to embarrass dissent. A prig in good form can make one ashamed to hold a conviction so lightly, and, at the same time, ashamed to hold it at all.

I will offer an example of the kind of thing I mean. Our modern zealots have dietary laws. Puritans did not, Calvin having merely urged moderation. For him, many things were “things indifferent,” that is, he considered it wrong to attach importance to them. This is a concept alien to the new zealotry.

There has been much attention in recent years to diet as a factor in determining the length and quality of life. That is, the idea together with all sorts of supporting information and speculation has been more than commonplace for a very long time. So here priggishness has a natural stronghold. One codicil of these dietary laws: It is good to eat fish. It is good to eat fish because it is bad to eat beef, an inefficient way to package protein, as Ralph Nader told us years ago, and a destructive presence in the world ecology, and a source of fat and cholesterol. It is good to eat fish because breast cancer is relatively rare in Japanese women and the Japanese life expectancy is imposing and beef was associated somewhere by someone with aggressive behavior in men. Also, steers are warm and breathy and have melting eyes, while fish are merely fish.

A shift in American tastes is a shift in global ecology. The sea has been raided and ransacked to oblige our new scruple, till even some species of shark are threatened with extinction. I myself am inclined to believe that no ecology is so crucial as the sea, or so impossible to monitor or to repair. Until we have some evidence that that great icon the whale can learn to live on municipal refuse and petroleum spills, we might try a little to respect the intricate and delicate system of dependencies necessary to its survival and already profoundly disturbed. Fish is a terribly inefficient way to package protein, if it is provided on a scale that diminishes the productivity of the sea. And consider: the sea is traditionally the great resource of the poor. We are ashamed to eat beef because only a very wealthy country could sustain such a food source. And it makes us fat, parodies of ourselves. So what is any self-respecting people to do? Why, take away the food of the poor. Then at last we will be virtuous, as they are.

As for the matter of the health benefits of eating fish, I think that person is a poor excuse for an ecologist who would tax a crucial and faltering natural system to extend her life a few years, assuming so much can be hoped. People in poor countries whose coasts and fishing grounds have been ruined will give up many years for the sake of the few she will gain, losing children to lengthen her old age. But certain of us have persuaded ourselves that a life lived in accordance with sound principles will be long, so longevity is as solemnly aspired to as goodness would have been in another time.

It is not hard to raise questions about the virtue of eating fish, or about the ecological consequences of mining quartz for those crystals that make us feel so at one with the earth. And is it really worth the petroleum, the pollution, the environmental wear and tear, to import drinking water? Such questions would be inevitable, if these were not the tastes of people who are strongly identified in their own minds as virtuous, and if these were not in fact signs by which they make themselves recognizable to others and to themselves as virtuous. For a very long time this country has figured in the world as a great appetite, suddenly voracious, as suddenly sated, disastrous in either case. The second worst thing that can be said about these virtuous people is, they have not at all escaped the sins of their kind. The worst thing that can be said is they believe they have escaped them.

People who are blind to the consequences of their own behavior no doubt feel for that reason particularly suited to the work of reforming other people. To them morality seems almost as easy as breathing. Fish-eating water-drinkers who confront their geriatric disorders in long anticipation — we could all be like them. But if there is, as I wish to suggest, little to choose between the best of us and the worst of us in terms of our ecological impact, how do the zealots command the attention they do? Why do they have no real critics?

First of all, as I have said, they are archdefenders of the obvious, for example, of the proposition that the planet needs looking after, and that one’s health needs looking after — and while their diligence may in fact be as destructive as the general lethargy, it is reassuring to all of us to think that there is a radical vanguard, girded with purpose, armed with fact, etc.

Second, there is simple snobbery. Here I am, reaching yet again into the lexicon of British dialect — no language of flatterers, in fact a reservoir of painful truth. Our zealots adopt what are in effect class markers. Recently I saw a woman correct a man in public — an older man whom she did not know well — for a remark of his she chose to interpret as ethnocentric. What he said could easily have been defended, but he accepted the rebuke and was saddened and embarrassed. This was not a scene from some guerrilla war against unenlightened thinking. The woman had simply made a demonstration of the fact that her education was more recent, more fashionable, and more extensive than his, with the implication, which he seemed to accept, that right thinking was a property or attainment of hers in a way it never could be of his. To be able to defend magnanimity while asserting class advantage! And with an audience already entirely persuaded of the evils of ethnocentricity, therefore more than ready to admire! This is why the true prig so often has a spring in his step. Morality could never offer such heady satisfactions.

The woman’s objection was a quibble, of course. In six months, the language she provided in place of his will no doubt be objectionable — no doubt in certain quarters it is already. And that is the genius of it. In six months she will know the new language, while he is still reminding himself to use the words she told him he must prefer. To insist that thinking worthy of respect can be transmitted in a special verbal code only is to claim it for the class that can concern itself with inventing and acquiring these codes and is so situated in life as to be able, or compelled, to learn them. The more tortuous our locutions the more blood in our streets. I do not think these phenomena are unrelated, or that they are related in the sense that the thought reforms we attempt are not extensive enough or have not taken hold. I think they are related as two manifestations of one phenomenon of social polarization.

There is more to this little incident. In fact, I must back up a considerable distance, widen the scene a little, if I am to do it any sort of justice. First of all, where did the idea come from that society should be without strain and conflict, that it could be satisfying, stable, and harmonious? This is the assumption that has made most of the barbarity of our century seem to a great many people a higher philanthropy. The idea came from Plato, I suppose. Our social thought has been profoundly influenced by a categorical rejection of Periclean Athens. No point brooding over that.

Let us look at the matter scientifically. The best evidence must lead us to conclude that we are one remote and marginal consequence of a cosmic explosion. Out of this long cataclysm arose certain elements and atmospheres, which in combination and over time produced, shall we say, New York City, with all it embraces and implies. Well, all right. Imagine accident upon coincidence upon freak, heightened by mysterious phenomena of order and replication, and there you have it. That natural process should have produced complicated animals who exist in vast aggregations is conceivable. But, I submit, that they should be suited to living happily — in vast aggregations or in farming villages or as hermits on the tops of mountains — is a stroke of thinking so remarkable in a supposedly nontheological context that it takes my breath away. Scientifically speaking, we are weird, soft, bigheaded things because we adapted to the mutable world by keeping a great many options open. Biologically speaking, we are without loyalties, as ready to claim an isthmus as a steppe. In our bodies we are utterly more ancient than Hittites and Scythians, survivors of the last swarm of locusts, nerved for the next glaciation. We have left how many cities standing empty? That any condition of life should be natural and satisfactory to us is an idea obviously at odds with our nature as a species, and as clearly at odds with our history. Would not mass contentment be maladaptive? Yet so much of modern life has been taken up with this nightmare project of fitting people to society, in extreme cases hewing and lopping away whole classes and categories. Humankind has adopted and discarded civilization after civilization and remained itself. We have done the worst harm we have ever suffered by acting as if society can or should be stable and fixed, and humankind transformed by whatever means to assure that it will be.

I am making this argument in terms not natural to me. My heart is with the Puritans. I would never suggest that history, whatever that is, should be left to take its natural course, whatever that is. I accept what Jonathan Edwards might have called the “arbitrary constitution” of behests and obligations. I draw conclusions from the fact that we cannot reason our way to a code of behavior that is consistent with our survival, not to mention our dignity or our self-love. But, even in the terms of this argument, what could have been more brutal than these schemes to create happy and virtuous societies? Might we not all have been kinder and saner if we had said that discontent is our natural condition, that we are the Ishmael of species, that, while we belong in the world, we have no place in the world? And that this is true not because something went wrong, but because of the peculiar terms of our rescue from extinction? Our angst and our anomie have meant to us that society has gone wrong, which means that other people have harmed us. The corollary of this notion, that our unhappiness is caused by society, is that society can make us happy, or remove the conditions that prevent us from being happy. And if the obstacle to collective happiness is believed to be other people, terrible things seem justified.

When the woman in the episode I described rebuked and embarrassed someone for using the wrong language, she was acting on an assumption that is now very common and respectable, which is that vice, shall we call it, is perpetuated in society in words, images, narratives, and so on; that when these things are weeded out vice is attacked; that where they still appear vice is flourishing. The cruelest words and the most disturbing images have normally been discountenanced in this society, and have been cherished by those who love forbidden things, just as they are now. Formerly the society was more tolerant of racial slurs and vastly less tolerant of depictions of violence, especially against women. It was also more racist and less violent. I cannot speculate which is cause and which effect, or even if it is meaningful to describe the phenomena in those terms. In any case, the “vice” in this instance was on the order of saying Mohammedan for Muslim, Oriental for Asian. Neither of the forbidden words has a hint of aspersion in it. They are simply associated with old attitudes, which they are taken to contain and reveal. No matter that the man who misspoke is known to be a very generous-spirited man, who would never intend an aspersion against anyone. Social methods that have been used to restrict the expression of obscenity or aggression — shaming, for example — are now slurring over to control many other forms of language (and therefore, on the short-blanket principle that is always a factor in moral progress, no longer restrict obscenity and aggression). This is done on the grounds that certain words are socially destructive, as indeed in varying degrees and circumstances they may sometimes be. This would be no fit subject for an analysis of priggishness if it did not have at least one foot in safe moral territory.

But, needless to say, there are problems. One is in the binary assumption that ideas equal words and that words carry ideas in them. If the relationship between words and ideas were indeed that close, no one would be paid for writing. Words would not be transformed by use. New ideas would depend on new coinages. This is thinking of the kind I call Stalinist, because it derives moral confidence and authority from its incredible simplicity. Now, if anything in the world is complex, language is complex. But the point is not really to characterize language but to characterize society by implying that certain things are true about language. A great mythic world rests on the back of this small conceptual turtle.

Very early on I proposed that priggishness is so available to us, and that where we do not subscribe to it we are nevertheless so helpless against it, because we cherish a myth of conversion in which we throw off the character our society gives us and put on a new one in all ways vastly superior. Normally this great change is achieved by education, enhanced by travel, refined by reading certain publications, manifested in the approved array of scruples and concerns, observed ritually in the drinking of water, the eating of fish, the driving of Volvos, and otherwise. (I think to myself, if we must be so very imitative, why can we never imitate a grace or an elegance? But that is outside the range of the present discussion. Though I do note that priggishness has never shown any aptitude for such things, any more than elegance or grace have claimed an affinity with priggishness.) Among us salvation is proved by a certain fluency of disparagement and disavowal. The prig in us could not enjoy all this, or believe in it, if the distinctions made were only economic and social. They must also, first of all, be moral.

Here I will divulge a bitter thought. I will say, by way of preparation, that much of the behavior I observe in these people looks like the operations of simple fashion. Phrases and sensitivities change continuously, perhaps as a function of evolving consciousness, perhaps as a feature of intense and active peer group identification. Clearly, as economic subset, our zealots experience the same frissons of consumer optimism we all do, though they might be focused on fetish bears rather than video cameras, one desideratum supplanting another in the ordinary way. Traffic in moral relics is an ancient practice, and while it is not harmless, neither is much else.

But I think there might be another impetus behind all this mutation. I think because our zealots subscribe to the conversion myth, they can only experience virtuousness as difference. They do not really want to enlist or persuade — they want to maintain difference. I am not the first to note their contempt for the art of suasion. Certainly they are not open to other points of view. If it is true that the shaping impulse behind all this stylized language and all this pietistic behavior is the desire to maintain social distinctions, then the moral high ground that in other generations was held by actual reformers, activists, and organizers trying to provoke debate and build consensus, is now held by people with no such intentions, no notion of what progress would be, no impulse to test their ideas against public reaction as people do who want to accomplish reform. It is my bitter thought that they may have made a fetish of responsibility, a fetish of concern, of criticism, of indignation.

More bitter still is the thought that those who are, in Edwards’s terms, in need of justice, are, in contemporary terms, damaged, imperfectly humanized, across the divide. The fact is that in this generation, change in the lives of the poor and the undefended is change for the worse, again for the worse, always for the worse.

If serious efforts at rectification were being made, would this be true? If serious solutions were being attempted, would not someone hold them to the standard of their effect, and suggest a reconsideration?

While Calvinists spoke of an elect, Leninists and suchlike have spoken of an elite. The two words come from the same root and mean the same thing. Their elect were unknowable, chosen by God in a manner assumed to be consistent with his tendency to scorn the hierarchies and overturn the judgments of this world. Our elites are simply, one way or another, advantaged. Those of us who have shared advantage know how little it assures, or that it assures nothing, or that it is a positive threat to one’s moral soundness, attended as it is with so many encouragements to complacency and insensitivity. I have not yet found a Puritan whose Calvinism was so decayed or so poorly comprehended that he or she would say to another soul, I am within the circle of the elect and you are outside it. But translated into the terms of contemporary understanding, and into the terms of my narrative, that is what that woman said to that man.

A small thing, foolishness, bad manners. I run the risk of being ungenerous in taking this woman so much to task, and there is a whiff of snobbery in my own scorn for her pretensions. I accept the justice of all this, yet I persist.

The American salvation myth and the Stalinist salvation myth have in common the idea that the great body of the culture is a vast repository of destructive notions and impulses, that certain people rise out of the mass in the process of understanding and rejecting all that is retrograde, and that, for those people, there is never any use for, nor even any possibility of, conversation on equal terms with those who remain behind. The history of elites is brutal and terrible. When the impact of scientific and industrial and political elites finally becomes clear — and it has been devastating in every part of the world — it will become clear also that people picked at random off the street would probably have made better decisions. It would be wonderful if there were a visible elect, a true elite, who could lead us out of our bondage, out of our wilderness. But we are not so favored. Our zealots seem to assume they do provide such leadership — that if one cannot embrace their solutions it is surely because one is indifferent to great problems, or complicit in them. This is a manifestation of their presumption of legitimacy that I find especially disturbing, not least because their solutions then become the issue while the reality of the problems is forgotten, except by the police, the courts, the coroners.

If there is any descriptive value in the definition of morality I offered above, its great feature is autonomy. Tacitus admired the morality of the Germans, Calvin admired the morality of Seneca and Cicero — anyone who considers the question knows that morality can take any number of forms, that it can exist in many degrees of refinement and so on. We all distinguish instantly between a moral lapse and a difference of standards. Whatever else it is, morality is a covenant with oneself, which can only be imposed and enforced by oneself. Society can honor these covenants or not. Historically, it seems that repression often encourages them. The great antidote to morality is cynicism, which is nothing more than an understanding of how arbitrary morality is, how unpredictable and unenforceable, how insecurely grounded in self-interest. It appears to me that even very thoughtful people discover what terms they have made with themselves only as they live, which prohibitions are conditional, which absolute, and so on. So in this great matter of moral soundness or rigor or whatever, we are as great mysteries to ourselves as we are to one another. It should not be that way, of course. The human condition has an amazing wrongness about it. But if it is agreed that we are in this respect mysterious, then we should certainly abandon easy formulas of judgment. If it is true that morality is a form of autonomy, then social conditioning is more likely to discourage than to enhance it.

If, putting out of consideration the inwardness of people, and putting aside the uniqueness of the terms in which everyone’s relations with the world are negotiated, and excluding the very prevalent desire of people to align themselves with what they take to be right, and ignoring the fact that people have ideas and convictions for which they cannot find words, we choose to believe all the errors of our past are stored in the minds of those who use language we have declared to embody those errors, then we make the less sophisticated tiers of the society the problem and the enemy, and effectively exonerate ourselves. We know what they mean better than they do, so we only listen to hear them condemn themselves. In the name of justice we commit a very crude injustice. We alienate a majority of our people, and exclude them from a conversation of the most pressing importance to them, having nothing but our smugness to justify the presumption.

We must find a better model to proceed from.

This is John Calvin glossing the text “Love thy neighbor”:

Here, therefore, let us stand fast: our life shall best conform to God’s will and the prescriptions of the law when it is in every respect most fruitful for our brethren … It is very clear that we keep the commandments not by loving ourselves but by loving God and neighbor; that he lives the best and holiest life who lives and strives for himself as little as he can, and that no one lives in a worse or more evil manner than he who lives and strives for himself alone, and thinks about and seeks only his own advantage.

Here is John Calvin answering the question “Who is our neighbor?”

It is the common habit of mankind that the more closely men are bound together by the ties of kinship, of acquaintanceship, or of neighborhood, the more responsibilities for one another they share. This does not offend God; for his providence, as it were, leads us to it. But I say: we ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love; here there is no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all should be contemplated in God, not in themselves. When we turn aside from such contemplation, it is no wonder we become entangled in many errors. Therefore, if we rightly direct our love, we must first turn our eyes not to man, the sight of whom would more often engender hate than love, but to God, who bids us extend to all men the love we bear to him, that this may be an unchanging principle: Whatever the character of the man, we must yet love him because we love God.

No one is so contemptible or worthless “but the Lord shows him to be one to whom he has deigned to give the beauty of his image.” This is the theological basis for Jonathan Edwards’s wonderful definition of “justice.”

Whatever confronts us, it is not a resurgence of Puritanism. If we must look to our past to account for our present circumstances, perhaps we might ponder the impulse long established in it to disparage, to cheapen and deface, and to falsify, which has made a valuable inheritance worthless. Anyone who considers the profound wealth and continuing good fortune of this country must wonder, how do we make so little of so much? Now, I think, we are making little of the language of social conscience and of the traditions of activism and reform. We are losing and destroying what means we have had to do justice to one another, to confer benefit upon one another, to assure one another a worthy condition of life. If Jonathan Edwards were here, he would certainly call that a sin. I am hard pressed to think of a better word.